TALK TALK’s Spirit Of Eden has a mythology to match the music’s spellbinding potency. In an edited extract from his new book on the group, Graeme Thomson ventures into the disorienting darkness of Wessex Studios circa 1987 to shed new light on the making of an unrepeatable masterpiece
SHORTLY after news of Mark Hollis’ death became public knowledge, on the evening of February 24, 2019, Talk Talk’s de facto fourth member, co-writer and co-producer Tim Friese-Greene, posted a piece of music online. It was the demo of “Eden”, the second track on the group’s momentous 1988 album, Spirit Of Eden, taped shortly before the recording sessions proper began.
Phill Brown, the veteran engineer who spent the best part of a year working on the album, caught wind of the demo and thought two things. First: that a man as protective of his art as Hollis would not have been happy with it seeing the light of day, no matter the circumstances. Second: there had been demos for these songs?!
“It was surprising,” says Brown. “I was there from day one, for nine months until we finished, and not once was there any reference to demos. We never heard demos in the studio. No one talked about the demos or referred to anything. Certainly no musicians were ever played any demos. They weren’t even played the whole track!”
More than three decades after its release in September 1988, it seemed Talk Talk’s mysterious, miraculous fourth album still retained the ability to confound even those most closely involved in its construction. But then Spirit Of Eden doesn’t easily give up its secrets.
It is a uniquely enigmatic record: dense and elliptical, the power of silence vying with sudden vicious squalls; unusual, intriguing sounds and beautiful melody laid over hypnotic rhythm. The brief for all concerned in its creation was to bypass the conscious thought, the ingrained reflex, the muscle memory – to unearth something that not only had never been heard before, but would never be heard quite the same way twice.
BETWEEN May 1987 and March 1988, anyone passing Wessex Studios, a converted 18th-century hall attached to St Augustine’s Church in Highbury, north London, might have noticed two snazzy Toyota Land Cruisers parked outside reception. One belonged to Hollis, the other to Friese-Greene.
After five years of major-label advances, a handful of decent-sized hit singles, hefty album sales, festival spots and arena shows, nobody associated with Talk Talk was slumming it. Success meant freedom. Hollis resolved to make an ambitious album that had “an absolute calm, but an absolute intensity inside of that”.
Work began on Spirit Of Eden on May 11, 1987, in an atmosphere of sensory immersion. Neither the control room nor the live room of Studio 1 had windows. The sessions took place, according to Wessex’s chief engineer Stuart Stawman, “divorced from sunlight”. The aim was to recreate the mood of a late-night Traffic session in late 1967. Phill Brown – who had actually worked on late-night traffic sessions in 1967, which was why he got the job – recalls “an endlessly blacked-out studio, an oil projector in the control room, strobe lighting. Twelve hours a day in the dark listening to the same six songs for months. As the months went on, it became pretty intense.”
“There was an oppressive feeling a lot of the Talk Talk went to great lengths to build a disorientating, self-enveloping world intended to exclude everything but the music. Literally. “We were under strict instructions not to let the A&R people into the studio,” says Hill. “They could get to the reception, but they weren’t allowed past the door into the studio.”
The tracks were built from the drums up. With six rhythmic ideas roughly mapped out on a drum machine, drummer Lee Harris set up in an equipment cupboard off the main studio. Accompanied by flashing disco lights, he began laying down the bedrock to the tracks, with percussionist Martin Ditcham playing shaker alongside as a human metronome. This process took several weeks.
Talk Talk had played their final live show in September 1986; Hollis was tired of touring. “That made it very difficult for the other members,” said Friese-Greene in 2006. The fragmentation of the band, evident during the later stages of their previous album, The Colour Of Spring, continued during these sessions.
Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb is one of three bass players credited on the record. Lee Harris, meanwhile, was sidelined after his (remarkable) work was done.
“I think Lee enjoyed himself on Spirit Of Eden,” says Brown. “There was a good vibe, although it was mad. But once we had the drums down, Mark didn’t really want Lee hanging around – which is pretty tough, if you’re in the band. Lee would come in each day, hovering around, playing pool, but he certainly wasn’t welcome to sit and follow the procedure. It was Tim, Mark, myself and the tape assistant who were there all the time.”
“Mark and I had such a good understanding that it was a source of continual frustration to us that we had to constantly explain to other musicians what we wanted,” said Friese-Greene. “We started to play more and more of the stuff ourselves, to cut out the middleman.”
Stuart Stawman witnessed this merging of two musical sensibilities. “I became fascinated by the fluid way in which Mark and Tim would take it in turns at the keyboards trying to work out what a particular part should be,” he says.
“There was no possessiveness over who would eventually record the part. Everything was done in the service of the song. Some parts combined both of their playing. It was the same with guitar parts.”
It was Hollis who spent days playing the thrillingly fierce blues guitar motif at the start of “The Rainbow”, searching for the (im)perfect balance between rough and proficient. “He drove us fucking crazy,” says Stawman, who was elsewhere in the building working with The Bible on their album Eureka.
“We were in Wessex, mixing,” says The Bible’s guitarist, Neill MacColl. “We were in the games room, which was above their live area, and we heard Mark Hollis doing the riff from ‘The Rainbow’. I checked this recently with my brother Calum, who was also in the band: in his memory, they played the same riff for the whole week we were there; in mine, it was three days. Every time he did it, it was exactly the same and completely perfect. Calum eventually had enough and called down to the studio. He said, ‘Look, we’ve got two really good guitarists upstairs if you’re struggling with it. One of us can come and play it if you can’t get this right!’”
Phill Brown was often as bemused as everyone else. “When Mark went out to play guitar, he had parts, but it wasn’t as obvious as it may seem. He wasn’t really playing things as a song – verse chorus-middle-eight – because it was all pieced together. Each song was an unfolding thing. It just seemed very random to me.”
Spirit Of Eden is possessed of a blissed-out, narcotic quality, and Talk Talk were no strangers to altered states. Yet Phill Brown insists that the album “was actually made in a very straight head-wise situation. I would roll the odd spliff and some nights Mark would say, ‘Got a little taster?’ and he would take it home. He didn’t take drugs on the sessions at all.”
“Nobody was on coke, grinning and yammering away,” says Stawman, although interpretations vary regarding what constituted “the odd spliff”. “Every time we walked past the studio and the door opened, you actually couldn’t see the interior,” says Neill MacColl.
“It was like the witches’ conference. There were clouds of dope smoke coming out. They seemed to be locked into some drug-hazed underworld. We were stoned too, of course, just not as stoned as them…”
The sessions ran weekdays from late morning until midnight, with breaks for curry and pizza. Like a group of middle-rank office workers, the core trio of Brown, Hollis and Friese-Greene would often knock off at six o’clock to visit the local pub. On Fridays, Richard Hill was sometimes invited along, “if they remembered to give me a shout. Mark was always first at the pub door but last to the bar, I noticed.”
In contrast to the album’s beatific aura, a series of rarely heard control room outtakes reveal a caustic, sarcastic demotic. “They could be foulmouthed bastards for sure, and they enjoyed it,” says Stawman. “Mark went after me once and I thought, ‘Fuck this!’ So I mentioned that I had seen Talk Talk play [a famously disastrous gig supporting Genesis] at Milton Keynes Bowl in 1982. Straight face. His eyes sparkled and he said, ‘Oh, well played.’ I’d won the round. “Mark had that London rough streak. If we were playing table tennis, he was playing to fucking win. He could spot when his opponent stopped having a killer instinct. It’s that thing of reading the schoolyard, picking the strengths and weaknesses. It could be hysterically funny at times. At other times people’s feelings got hurt.”
BY October, six backing tracks had been completed, with the working titles “Modell”, “Camel”, “Maureen”, “Norm”, “Snow In Berlin” and “Eric”. The overdubs were where the real fun began. Each session musician was recorded individually. Acoustic instruments were mic’ed up from a distance of six feet, and amplifiers from 12 feet, allowing the ambience of the big room at Wessex full rein.
For all that Spirit Of Eden connects on a profoundly emotional and even spiritual level, it’s a highly technical construct. It plays with sound and space, manipulating notions of authenticity and spontaneity as cleverly and ruthlessly as any three-minute pop single. The consideration given to technology, instrumentation, the recording environment, equipment, angles, distance, temperature, matters of millimetres and microseconds, was truly obsessive.
“What we were doing on analogue back then is how people now work with digital, cutting and pasting and moving things around,” says Brown. “If something interesting happened at 1:30, Mark might say, ‘It’s in the wrong place.’ We’d play the track and get to, say, 4:22, and Mark would say, ‘That’s where we want it.’ We had control over literally getting something down to a millisecond early or later.”
The basic tracks for the entire first side of Spirit Of Eden were played to visiting musicians as one continuous 24-minute suite. Given opaque instructions – or none – each guest was granted a maximum of eight takes to respond to the music. “They were never allowed in the control room,” says Brown. “They were never spoken to on the headphones. There was no, ‘Hey, great, let’s do another one!’ We would only give some musicians the barest track to work to. Once they’d got used to that, on the fourth take we would take out half of what they’d heard and put in stuff that they hadn’t heard before. It almost made the track feel like a different thing completely. All the time, Mark was trying to keep everyone spontaneous and on their toes. First takes, first ideas.”
“It got much more experimental on Spirit…,” says Martin Ditcham, whose percussion tools included children’s toys and a glass tumbler. The churning sound, akin to a helicopter in slow motion, which picks up speed just before the two-minute mark during the early stirrings of “The Rainbow”, is Ditcham scraping a pestle and mortar with increasing intensity.
David Rhodes, who played guitar on Talk Talk’s final tour dates and contributed the searing hook to “Life’s What You Make It”, was called in again. He recalls the sessions as “playful – and very challenging. On one section, I said, ‘So are you thinking something a bit like Randy California?’ Mark said, ‘No, he was sat there yesterday.’ Suitably chastised, I spent hours there that day playing in the dark. Then we all went to the pub. And then nothing I did made it onto the album!”
Rhodes was in good company. During the sessions, if any part suggested the influence of another artist, Friese-Greene would declaim in a shrill, Pythonesque voice: “Give it back to Kajagoogoo!” “Give it back to Miles Davis!” “Give it back to Aretha Franklin!” “Give it back to the Andrews Sisters!”
The “give it back” list was long, and no reputation was spared. One musician summoned to Wessex was Larry Klein, who at the time was married to Joni Mitchell, and who’d played on, co-produced and co-written songs on her albums. “The conversation was polite,” says Stawman. “I remember him likening his current home in California to a French vineyard, then they got down to the business of working out bass parts. The session was wrapped up and he left.” Within an hour of Klein leaving, all his contributions had been erased, and Friese-Greene was heard to mutter, “I guess his wife is the creative one.”
“They gave him back to Joni,” says Stawman.
Nigel Kennedy was called in for the day, but his violin parts were deemed a little busy. Only a single note was used. A stunning vocal overdub by the Chelmsford Cathedral choir on “I Believe In You” was erased for the heinous crime of being “too good”.
“I’d get the sounds up and Mark would just say, ‘It sounds too good,’” says Brown. “I didn’t understand that! But I slowly got what he was about. He wanted things to feel real. He didn’t really care about technique or things being technically right. It had to have the right feel and the right vibe.”
Finding the precisely correct feel could be a punishing pursuit. Even Talk Talk loyalist, the late double-bass great Danny Thompson, wasn’t immune to occasional moments of exasperation. “Danny once told me about those sessions,” says Neill MacColl. “He’d been playing the same thing over and over. At one point, Tim or Mark came in and uttered the immortal phrase: ‘Those two notes in the middle – could you just give them a tiny bit more pressure?’ Danny said, ‘Look, mate, they’ve measured the pressure I give my notes. It’s about 56lbs per square inch. I’m not doing any more fucking pressure.’”
EARLY in 1988, towards the end of recording, Hollis finally addressed the vocals. “I don’t think he had the finished lyrics until seven or eight months into the record,” says Brown. “It was very much the last thing that went on. It was a fast process – fast for him to record the vocals and fairly fast deciding what we were going to use.”
The sense-world of Spirit Of Eden seemed partly drawn from Hollis’s new domestic circumstances. The words were written in the heart of the English countryside, in the tiny village of Stanningfield in Suffolk, where Hollis, his wife and a growing menagerie of animals had recently moved from London into the Old Rectory. Their first child was born while the record was being made.
“I remember Mark bringing in some apples from his garden,” says David Rhodes. “He had only recently moved to Suffolk, and he was starting to know a little bit about plants. I’d just got my first little garden, and he was suggesting plants to me. I have nice, happy memories of that.”
EMI’s head of promotions Malcolm Hill recalls a similar conversation. “Mark had bought this big place with acres of land. I said, ‘Who’s going to look after all that?’ He said, ‘No, no, I’m just going to keep a square at the back of the house tidy, and the rest is going to go to wild.’”
It’s tempting to view Spirit Of Eden as nature run riot, the more ordered lines and straight edges of the band’s past music dug up and grown over. But this was a planned rewilding. Strategic spontaneity. On Spirit Of Eden, says Brown, “It’s an illusion, what you’re hearing.”
Almost 40 years later, the mysteries in the music they all created are still being unpicked. “Spirit Of Eden could have been made 30-odd years ago, or in the 1960s, or a year or two ago,” says Brown. “That was something Mark was really conscious of, without ever saying it directly: that it would be timeless.”
Graeme Thomson’s In Another World: The Four Seasons Of Talk Talk is available now from New Modern
